The Blue Touch Paper (18 page)

I am not sure how quickly I apprehended what would turn out to be my most important discovery about playwriting: fundamentally, I had no control. Whatever the clarity of my intentions, the actual writing of the play
Slag
only glancingly resembled my original conception. It's a cliché to say that while you're writing a play the characters take over. They appropriate the action and head off in unforeseen directions. However, what would be both truer and more interesting to say is that it's not only the characters. Every line of dialogue, every exit and entry, every development of the story, every deliberate change of mood on the stage pleases or displeases the author for reasons they would be at a loss to explain. The mystery of style is
exactly that: a mystery. Yes of course, I could clean the play up. I could redraft. I could look intelligent when people asked me questions. I could, if necessary, make the action more deft. I was perfectly capable of saying, ‘That scene's working, but that one isn't. That joke's working, but that one isn't.' But to the basic question ‘Why is the play the way it is?' I had no answer at all.

In all my years of supposedly studying literature, this most basic fact about fiction had never occurred to me. I had assumed writers wrote what they wanted. Realising the untruth of this, as I did in Battersea in the deep winter of 1969, was a moment of complete liberation. At last I had discovered an activity in which, refreshingly, the will was subservient. The most significant thing about Milton suddenly seemed to be his blindness. Remember, I had been a teacher and disliked myself when I was. I had not much cared for myself when I was a young theatre director either. Only when I became a creative writer could I rid myself of self-consciousness, and of worldly ambition. No writer can sit down and say, ‘I'm going to write a world-beating masterpiece,' because the question of whether you will be able to is not in your hands. You may make all the plans you like, but ultimately you are at the mercy of your imagination – whatever that might be. The page fills or it doesn't. You're powerless. Once I began to write in anything like calm, I noticed very soon that you couldn't force it. If you did try to force it, if you wrote words which did not convince you, a strange feeling, rather like an elephant sitting on your chest, would begin to oppress you. Far from frightening me, this revelation of powerlessness set me free. Because I was no longer in command, I was able to stop worrying about the effect of what I was doing. The inhibiting question ‘What will people think of my play?' which might have bothered me had I become a writer as an adolescent, now
as an adult became wonderfully unimportant. I had no idea. The play was writing itself. I would have no more influence over what people made of it than I had over writing it.

I was, in short, discovering my subconscious, and acceding to it. For the rest of my life I would superstitiously refuse to answer the inevitable question ‘What are you writing?' I have believed from that very first winter of 1969 that if you talk about it, it goes away. How, anyway, can you say, ‘I plan to march on Moscow,' when your imagination, unknown to you, is planning to make Berlin submit? I know one thing. If anything has been my salvation as a human being it is this choice of an activity which is, at the deepest level, out of my hands. What a relief! What a blessing! Better still, it had always been a drawback to see life differently from other people. In childhood, it had brought me little but heartache. Now I had stumbled on a profession in which it was an asset.

7

Five Good Scenes

At the Royal Court, at any one moment, we had stacks of plays being considered. For many years the Court was the only substantial-sized theatre in London dedicated to doing new plays, and with the opening of a ninety-seat Theatre Upstairs to replace a restaurant and cabaret club we were still expanding. From the start in 1956, the theatre had attracted manuscripts from writers as diverse as Sartre, Henry Miller and Wyndham Lewis. There were none of today's probationary antics with writers being expected to waste their time rewriting at directors' whim in the slender hope of production. The artistic directors liked you or they didn't. Nearly every play around was submitted – I even received one from Agatha Christie, one of her archaeological ones, not a mystery, but still – and because of the fierce distinctiveness of the theatre's ideology, British dramatists could be relied on to feel strongly about whether they were in or out of favour in Sloane Square. Everyone had a Royal Court radar. In a single week, the artistic directors rejected plays by Alan Bennett, Simon Gray and Peter Nichols, all on the grounds that they were not the sort of thing the Royal Court should be doing. Inevitably with supply and demand so out of balance, there were many dashed hopes. But in those times of messy manuscripts, carbon paper and handwritten emendations, the one certain sign that your play was being fast-tracked for the stage was when Bill Gaskill licensed the expense of sending the original copy off
to a firm of professional typists. It was when the theatre piled up thirty spanking new scripts in coloured covers on the casting director's shelves that you knew you were in business.

It was uplifting therefore, when in the new year Clive Goodwin had forwarded
Slag
to Michael Codron, to hear back within a couple of days not from the producer himself but from the swanky offices of Scripts Limited in Beak Street, with some minor enquiry about spacing. When Michael rang in person, he was soft-spoken to a point where I could not quite hear him. He displayed a canny mix of courage and caution which I would come to know as characteristic. He thought that
Slag
was a little too bold to go directly into the West End. Would I like to try it out at the Royal Court first? When I said that sending the play to my withering bosses would be a waste of time and a humiliation – feminist comedy was probably not ideal for a theatre which was neither feminist nor comic – Michael changed tack. For some time he had served on the board of the Hampstead Theatre Club, and he knew for a fact that it was going through one of those gruelling periods of bad luck all theatres are prone to. Why didn't we do it there? It would have the added advantage that we could go into rehearsal almost immediately and open in a recently vacated spot in April.

At this point I was given a little rope and proceeded to hang myself. When Hampstead's founder and artistic director, James Roose-Evans, a rather schoolmasterly gentleman who was all eyebrows and brown herringbone and who would later be consecrated as an Anglican priest, asked me whom I would like to direct the play, I said there was a young American, not long out of Yale Rep, who had enviable resources of self-confidence. I had found myself talking to Roger Hendricks Simon a lot after his production in the Theatre Upstairs of Sam Shepard's
La Turista
.
I liked him. Both Michael and James Roose-Evans pointed out to me that my suggestion was perverse. I had written an original and rather surreal English comedy, what's more, one of the very first plays in the modern theatre to feature an all-female cast – they both said they had never read anything like it – and, for some reason, I was proposing to have it directed by an American man who knew nothing of the culture it sprang from. I said something beguilingly idiotic, like how I thought that was exactly why Roger might be an interesting choice.

From the first week of rehearsals near Swiss Cottage, the scale of my misjudgement was revealed. Indeed, it became apparent during the morning of Day One. Sure, I enjoyed ball games as much as the next person, but I could see that Rosemary McHale, Marty Cruickshank and Diane Fletcher, who made up the outstandingly talented cast, did not want to long postpone their approach to a demanding text by putting on baseball caps or doing improvisations. When on the tenth day the ball games were still continuing, I knew that the situation was serious. Did this director ever intend to get down to work? At nights, I would get phone calls at home from the three of them asking me why I wasn't coming in to rehearsals and what I could do to help. By the third week, aching to get on with the play, they deputed one of their number to call me and say that they no longer had confidence in Roger Hendricks Simon. Would I go to the management and get him replaced? Of course, when I went to James Roose-Evans and told him that rehearsals couldn't go on as they were, he was justifiably annoyed. Who wouldn't be? After all, it was I who had insisted on this outlandish choice of director. But Roose-Evans was even more annoyed when, encouraged by me, he approached the actresses in person. They understandably did not wish to be marked out as troublemakers. They felt that for
working actresses to unseat a director would have endangered their futures in their clubby, man-run milieu. So, confronted by Roose-Evans, they backed down, denying that they had ever issued any kind of ultimatum. Yes, it was true they did ring me in the evening to sound off, and no, they didn't find the director easy. But if Hampstead preferred him to continue, far be it from them to suggest otherwise.

My reputation in the British theatre for being ruthless and arrogant may not have originated in these events, but they cemented it. For better or worse, at this point I decided after a sleepless night in Battersea that somebody had to take charge of a deteriorating situation and it had better be me. Margaret encouraged me in this, telling me that it was my play and I had to do something about it. Just over a week from opening, with several of the play's six scenes unrehearsed, I travelled up the Bakerloo line to strike a deal with Roger. He could remain as director in name, and indeed he could also continue in charge of the technical side of putting the play into the theatre, if, in return, he allowed the actresses to answer only to me. To my astonishment, far from being unhappy with this arrangement, he seemed rather to welcome it. He thought my help would be useful. He looked forward to hearing my ideas. He gave me exactly the same blithe grin of contentment which had irradiated his face during ball games. Within an hour or two of this new dispensation, the play began to unlock itself and to find its rhythm, not through any contribution of mine but because the actresses themselves had so long dreamed of being allowed to work. By removing the obstacle to that work, I had done all that was needed. I had let them out of the cage. From now on, my most important contribution was to sit in the rehearsal room every day watching everything get better.

Nevertheless, we were in a high state of nerves at the first preview. As Anthony Page later observed,
Slag
is rather like a marijuana dream. If you abandon yourself to it, you will have a good time. The audience did fortunately roar with laughter, happy to have their socks charmed off by three talented players. We all reached the end feeling pleased with ourselves. So I was puzzled when James Roose-Evans, who was for good reason sick to death of me, insisted on leading me backstage to an unoccupied dressing room. There he sat down with a walking stick between his hands and began an excruciating pedagogic discourse setting out what he considered to be the play's strengths and failings. All my Cambridge hackles rose at having my homework marked. I was back in the Leavisite interrogation cell. I had not the slightest idea why Roose-Evans thought any correctional procedure necessary, since in accepting to produce the play he had presumably discerned some virtue in it. The last couple of hours had represented the first zephyrs of energy to blow through his theatre for months. His spidery dissertation continued endlessly, scene by scene. By the time he had reached halfway, I was dangerously angry in a white-hot, rumbly sort of way, and broke in very quietly to inform him that of all the things I imagined a producer to be, drama critic was not one of them. Further, I said, I had never seen anything in Roose- Evans's own achievements as a director which even marginally qualified him to lecture others. Needless to say, the session then ended abruptly and in disarray, and I found myself for the rest of previews on non-speaking terms with the management, while also assiduously avoiding the beaming director. As I came out, shaking, into the bar to join the cast I was amazed, and secretly rather touched, to find Bill Gaskill standing waiting. He had never in the preceding months given even the slightest
indication that he was aware of the play, let alone interested in attending. I asked him why on earth he had come to the first preview. It was far too early, we weren't ready. ‘Don't worry,' Bill said. ‘It never gets any better.'

In spite of Bill's resounding aphorism,
Slag
turned out a copper-bottomed success. Having first of all pronounced
Slag
too bold, Michael Codron now pronounced it too short, and said it could only transfer to the West End if it were paired with a short sex farce which was running at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford. He took me and Margaret to watch some big-chested girls running round with their tops off, then drove us in his gold Mercedes to eat in silence at the Esher Steak House on the way home. I couldn't take any of it seriously. As far as I was concerned, whatever happened, everything was gain. In those days, success was tangible. You could eat it. The major Hollywood studios all had script editors in London, so I got taken out to seven expensive lunches at seven expensive restaurants by middle-aged Americans who just loved my play. They'd be interested in anything I wanted to do. They outdid each other in the magnificence of the settings in which they told me this. I even went to the Connaught twice, without ever intending to write any of their rotten films. The European head of United Artists told me that he was ashamed of the James Bond films for which he was responsible, and asked if I could come up with one which was less ‘fascist'? Hollywood, indeed! Clive, as usual, was keen to make some money so he persuaded me to sell the film rights to
Slag
in perpetuity for £4000. Since the perfect three-storey Victorian terraced house Margaret and I had seen at the top of the Chase, next to Clapham Common, was on the market for £8000, this seemed an auspicious sum.